Google Pulls The Plug On Google Code, Its Open Source Hosting Service

Years ago, competition for online code hosting was frenzied, but with the arrival of GitHub in 2008, they've all slowly wandered off into the sunset. The latest casualty is Google Code, with Google this week announcing that it'll be shuttering the service in stages over the course of the next 10 months.

Google's director of open source Chris DiBona explains the details over at the company's open source blog. Essentially, many hosted projects have long since migrated to GitHub (including a great deal of Google's own efforts, such as Chromium) and those that do remain are mostly "spam or abuse". The time required to police these projects was proving too much and so the decision was made to put the service to pasture.

Of course, Google's isn't pulling the plug immediately. The most immediate change was made on 12 March, when Google disabled new project creation. Nothing much will happen until 24 August, at which point, Google Code will become read-only.

Finally, on 25 January next year, it'll be closed completely, with the only interaction possible being the ability to download tarballs containing "source, issues and wikis" for projects. These will be available until the end of 2016.

So, you have plenty of time to move from Google Code and the company does offer tools for exporting projects to other services, including GitHub and Bitbucket.

It's never good to see Google shutting down another one of its products, but I think we can all agree that Google Code has been well and truly outclassed by its competitors.

Comments

once again my username proves so bloody relevant. Rather than the tried-and-tested dogfeeding approach where Google devs put up with Google Code until they get fed up enough to make a better one, they're losing a massive source of creativity. I knew of Google Code to be the place to get picked up by Google devs and execs after submitting great code and projects. I used great code off that repository. Letting the creativity escape for someone else to benefit from, like GitHub, is destructive to the company's unfettered access to people who are in the thick of continuous innovation.

Bullshit decision made due to them not paying attention to their own products. hundreds of offices globally; tens of thousands of rejected A+ graduate and expert CVs, and they couldn't find anyone to maintain the most basic of developer necessities.

Сергей said...Google I hope someday you close your search engine and company at all.
Welcome to Google Cemetery.March 12, 2015 at 10:48 AM

The question is also whether just a code repository service like Google Code is differentiated enough and has high enough value, or the market will start going up the stack to more integrated solutions like IBM Bluemix and WSO2 App Cloud: http://wso2.com/cloud/app-cloud/ - and thus get not just the code storage but the whole set of tools you need to develop and run the apps: cloud IDE, databases, testing, lifecycle management, app hosting, etc.

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